Sunday, May 21, 2017

Friends and politics

The president of the Spanish Second Republic (1931-1936) Manuel Azaña famously said that politicians should behave as if they had no friends. To Mr. Azaña, friends and politics were incompatible. The fact is, though, that politics is a very social experience. Those that are not willing to afford the luxury of being apolitical, share experiences with others through their life time. For some people, politics is a sporadic experience, perhaps an intermittent one, limited to voting when there are elections, and not even always. In the other extreme, there are professional career politicians who spend their adult lives in a professional public or political job (actually, in many of them). The attention is focused on many of them, for which their life is more complicated than lay citizens are prepared to accept. But in between the passive citizens and the career politicians, there are millions who are active in politics: members of political parties, activists in politicized organizations like unions or associations, journalists, and these days also just normal people with an account in Twitter, in Facebook or with a blog. What happens when you have shared experiences with people who have become your close friends from these experiences and all of a sudden you disagree on substantial issues? I remember that something like this happened to Stefan Zweig as he explains in "The World of Yesterday." Many of his friends who had shared with him a political and intellectual dialogue in a cosmopolitan Europe, suddenly became fascinated by nationalism in the first world war. I have to confess that something similar, at a much more modest scale, has happened to me. Friends with whom I shared many political experiences in my youth, with whom I campaigned in support of the left and the center-left and a federal and united Europe, suddenly have embraced nationalism, and in particular the campaign for the secession of Catalonia that has been ongoing since 2012. Has the same happened to people in the USA, the UK, and France, with other national-populisms? Some of my friends have attained positions of relevance in the media and have political jobs around the pro-secession majority that controls the Catalan government. Sometimes I feel anger. At other times, I feel a desire to respond to them with irony or sarcasm (I happen to know where they come from ideologically). Mostly, I feel personal pain and sadness. Can we still be friends? Political positions should not affect personal relationships in theory. But our friendship was born from politics. We were trained in values that I thought were common to us: fraternity, solidarity, internationalism. Is all that gone?